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How Does This Impact Me?

In addition to having municipalities receive lower returns on their loans around the time of the financial crisis, it appears that US home buyers may have been scammed out of nearly a half-trillion Dollars on overpriced mortgage payments:

Early analysis suggests that for a period of several years before and after the 2008 financial crisis, the London interbank offered rate (LIBOR) was manipulated to such an extent that a family with a $100,000 mortgage would have been $50 to $100 worse off a month because of the fixing.

$100/month per family x ~100 million families = $10 billion stolen per month in the United States alone.

Or $120 billion per year.
For several years.

In the United States alone this is quite-plausibly a half-trillion dollar heist.

By fixing LIBOR rates (high or low) & using leverage on derivative investments, there are a near infinite number of ways for banksters to skim trillions of Dollars from the productive economy.

How Exactly Are Libor Rates Calculated?

Every year the Foreign Exchange and Money Markets Committee, a part of the British Bankers' Association, selects 'panel banks' using the criteria of volume, activity, credit worthiness, and currency proficiency. These panel banks are asked how much interest they think they would be charged by other banks if they were to borrow money in certain currencies and over certain periods of time.

The panel banks, or 'contributor banks', submit their perceived borrowing rates between 5:00am and 5:10am EST to their 3rd party calculating agent, Thomas Reuters. The contributor banks have software provided by Thomas Reuters to easily submit rates.

Thomas Reuters collects the rate information from all contributor banks, takes out the top 25% and bottom 25%, and averages the middle 50% to be the actual Libor (bbalibor) rate. For example, if 18 contributing banks each submit 1 rate to be calculated, the top 4 and bottom 4 rates will be dropped and the average of the remaining 10 rates will be calculated.

When Are Libor Rates Published?

Around 12 noon London Time. The rates can be viewed by companies with certain tiers of licensing through the British Bankers' Association.